EXPATS AGAIN

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I am married to the love of my life and am finally able to shower him with all of the attention he deserves. I am now retired and living the life here in Europe. I am an American, he is an Australian, and this is our second overseas address. The first was Shanghai, China and now Munich, Germany. Come along and live the life with us as we continue our adventure of discovering all Europe has to offer.

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Wednesday, September 1, 2010

POUR YOUR HEART OUT WEDNESDAY

This is not meant to be a rant or a means to get "something off my chest." After all, what I am dealing with is a common occurrence for many of us and when I rationalize it, it is readily able to be resolved; if you have a Master's degree in technology, I suppose. Unfortunately, my Master's degree is useless in this situation. As a result, I'm beginning to think that feeling helpless in this kind of a situation is an ominous precursor to the way, God help us, our lives are meant to be lived in the future. Just work with me here.... This is what happened. Today I was unable to use our Slingbox on my Apple computer. Slingbox is a device that allows you to view your home's cable t.v., remotely. Since we live in Munich, we watch American t.v. from our home in the U.S. It appears on the computer and we connect it to our t.v. It works great! It has always worked like a charm, but yesterday it was inoperable on the Mac; although, for some odd reason, it worked perfectly fine on my HP laptop. (Go figure.)

I could guess as to what created this failure, but I would just be guessing. Instead, I foresee hours and hours of scouring through web-site forums and trying various recommended fixes ahead of me. Hopefully leading to success. If that fails, an overseas telephone call to a Slingbox technical assistant just might fix the problem. Either way, it worked yesterday and it doesn't work today.

Since I could not turn on American t.v., I began to do paperwork only to learn that my HP Officejet 6210 printer, never that temperamental before, unequivocally decided that it was not in the mood to print.(I didn't see this one coming either.) After many attempts at printing out a document, in frustration, I finally gave up. My Plan B had me forward the document via email as an attachment to my hubby and have him print it out at the office and then bring it home with him this evening. Not the most efficient way to get things done, but I had no other choice. (Thank you, my dear.)

From that fiasco, I turned to reading emails only to find out that I need to figure out why some attachments people send to me will not open on the new Apple. I guess I need to determine what specific Adobe Reader or other mysterious media related thingy-ma-bob I should download in order to view the video bits people like to send me. (On second thought, perhaps I don't really need to see those things, if you know what I mean.)

It was after this third technical conundrum that I began to have an unwelcome feeling of foreboding.

Now, I am just a regular person with minor technical difficulties, but imagine if some glitch or nefarious glitch in the universe or cosmos put all of us into a downward spiraling technological turmoil? Think of it, is there "anything" that we do that doesn't rely on some kind of technology from our cell phones, to our internet banking, to our email, to our remote t.v. viewing, etc? Imagine all of the businesses, utilities, hospitals, schools, military, governmental -- why, think of everyone, everywhere that currently relies on all of these electrons zipping through space to conduct their communication and business.

I've read the doomsday scenarios where villains set out to cause mayhem and disruption, and likely so have you. I know hackers are continually keeping internet security forces to muster one-step ahead of them in the battle to keep information and computer data safe from harm. This, sadly, is not fantasy, but an all too true reality of what our world has come to be. There's no turning back for us.

Living in the aftermath of a colossal collapse ofautomation,computers,electroniccomponents,hitech,industrial,machinery,robotics, and telecommunications would be cataclysmic. People would meet personal disaster, countries would fall, and the current economic crisis would look like a game of tiddlywinks.

I am sure my tiny technological fails are just that--tiny and not the signs of the collapse of the modern world as we know it. (My husband would say, " You've built a mountain out of a molehill," and he would be right.)

But have you ever contemplated, "What if?"

P.S. Sent the hubby the attachment and asked him to print it out. I signed my request, "Love, Wifey Poo." He replied, "Dear Wifey Poo--Will doo."